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Saying yes again with IT

Wed, Sep 06, 2017 - 5:50 AM

It is difficult to flip through the news today without reading another headline about digital transformation or the slogan that every company is an IT company today. On the front lines, IT departments often find the situation very different.

The pressure to digitalise processes is relentless, yet many companies struggle to shift operations around as quickly. While many cloud solutions promise improved efficiency and elasticity, they do not fit every organisation as snugly as technology proponents often say. And cost, it is always an issue.

With these difficulties, many IT departments end up being naysayers instead of enablers of positive change. In saying no so often, they feel they are holding back their organisations, instead of moving them ahead.

After all, how can one get about transforming processes until you consolidate the server sprawl over many years? Or to move from legacy storage systems to new hybrid solutions that bring the best of both on-premise and cloud technologies together?

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The answer lies in picking a technology solution provider that knows your business. It has to not just paint a big picture but fill in the gaps when it comes to the nitty gritty. It has to provide a flexible environment that fuels an organisation’s transformation.

Hybrid IT solutions from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) bring the agility needed to solve the key challenges facing businesses of various types and sizes. They aim to be the missing pieces of a puzzle, as IT leaders look to raise capabilities in a competitive environment.

This could be in the form of a hybrid infrastructure. By providing the right mix of traditional IT, private cloud and public cloud, hybrid IT enables a business to transform its key infrastructure without disrupting business. Integrating both legacy systems and new technologies, the approach can improve operational speed, provide control over IT and enhance responsiveness.

This hybrid IT strategy also enables businesses to decide which workloads work best in specific environments, so they can strike a balance of cost optimisation, security, performance and business agility.

As the industry’s leading provider of hybrid IT, HPE provides the secure, next-generation software-defined infrastructure that will run customers’ data centres today, bridge to multi-cloud environments tomorrow, and power the emerging intelligent edge that will run campus, branch, and industrial IoT applications for decades to come.

One customer that modernised its IT infrastructure with HPE was Trustpower in New Zealand. The multi-utility service provider took the opportunity to bring its IT infrastructure to the cloud as it physically moved its headquarters to a new location.

Transitioning 176 legacy applications to the cloud, it took up a hybrid approach to public and private clouds and solved the problem of a fractured, siloed ecosystem that grew out of its 22-year development.

With its applications now cloud-ready, it is able to foster innovation among team members and focus on new projects to differentiate itself in a competitive market. Plus, the agility has enabled Trustpower to provide better experiences to both internal and external customers.

Today’s solutions cannot answer all of tomorrow’s needs. So, HPE is looking to the future to fulfil customers’ changing business requirements.

Over the next five years, HPE is investing US$140 million in Singapore. It will also work with 12 local companies to grow innovation from here. Eventually the solutions generated here could be used for various verticals. Local enterprises could also draw on these solutions for the unique challenges they face.

With the opening of the HPE Customer Engagement Centre in Singapore in May, customers can explore the solutions available to accelerate their innovation and reduce time to market. They can also glean valuable lessons from other customers that have deployed the solutions earlier.

With the right partner, IT departments can deploy the right technologies fast and accelerate the change they seek. Instead of saying something cannot done, they can be the vital cog moving an organisation forward, transforming its business for the future.